ELECTION CIIIEF SAY SPECIAL PREPARATION NEEDED FOR ELECTION Kathmandu, 26 Sept.: Acting Chief Commissioner of the Election Commission (EC), Nilkantha Upreti, has said that preparations for the election should be special as the election to the Constituent Assembly (CA) is also of special type as compared to other elections, RSS reports from Biratnagar. Upreti made this remark while talking to media persons here on Wednesday. Stating that elections could be held with complete preparations only if the government clearly informed the EC before 120 days of the date of the CA election, he said difficulties will be surfaced to hold elections if there was no amendment of the Election Act and if other processes were not completed. Upreti said consensus should be forged among political parties before declaring the date of election and there should be amendment in laws and acts related to election. Stating that there is a constitutional crisis in the country, he said a total of 11 million names of voters have been collected where three million populations is out of the country and names of 1.2 million people have not been registered. Meanwhile, Upreti laid the foundation stone of a new building of Election Office to be constructed at Prativa Chowk-13 in Morang district today.The building with 15 rooms is going to be constructed at a cost of Rs. 20.8 million. nnnn SUKLA OF TMLP CALLS UCPN MAOIST, UML IRRESPONSIBLE Kathmandu, 26Sept.: General Secretary of the Terai-Madhes Loktantrik Party Sarbendra Nath Shukla has said that irresponsibility on the part of the UCPN -Maoist and CPN-UML has increased a risk that the nation may face a grave accident any time. Speaking at a press meet here on Wednesday, leader Shukla said the 'so-called' big parties do not want to go for fresh elections since they have already lost the people's confidence and trust. Nepal can be turned into a country like Ethiopia if the existing crisis is not settled within mid-November, he said. Former minister Shukla further stressed the need of investigating the issues related to financial irregularities reported inside the Maoist camps by the Commission for Investigation of Abuse of Authority and bringing out the facts about it. He also held talks and meetings with the party's senior cadres in Morang today [Tuessday], RSS reports from Biratnagar. nnnn NOTED US EXTREME SKIER SURVIVES MANASLU AVALANCHE. Kathmandu, 26Sept.:: Renowned American extreme skier Glen Plake, one of the survivors of the weekend Himalayan avalanche that killed at least eight people, said Wednesday he feels lucky to be alive but heartbroken that he could not save two friends who remain missing, AP reports from Kathmandu,. Plake is a champion hot-dog skier who has appeared in many extreme-skiing documentaries, including 1988's "The Blizzard of AAHHH's," and also is well known for the tall mohawk he wears on the slopes. He had planned to ski down Mount Manalsu, the world's eighth-highest mountain, after reaching the summit. "I was awake in my tent reading my Bible. ... The tent began to shake. We thought it was the wind but in fact it was an avalanche," Plake told reporters at the Kathmandu airport after returning from the mountain in a helicopter. "It was like an earthquake; it was like a tsunami." Though he said he is "probably the luckiest person in the world," he was unable to find his friends and climbing companions, Remy George Lecluse and Gregory Ugo Costa, both of France. "You are doing everything you can do because your friends' lives depend on your next action," he said. "Unfortunately everything I did proved to produce nothing. At that point, I had to think about my own life and start preparing." Lecluse and Costa are among three people still missing from the avalanche, which swept the tents at camp 2 at an elevation of 7,000 meters (22,960 feet) before dawn Sunday. Nepalese mountaineering officials say eight bodies have been recovered: Fabrice Priez, Philippe Lucien Bos, Catherine Marie Andree Richard and Ludovic Paul Nicolas Challeat of France; German Christian Mittermeyer; Italian Alberto Magliano; Spaniard Marti Roirg Gasull; and Nepali Dawa Dorji. Many of the survivors have returned to Kathmandu, the Nepalese capital, and have abandoned their plans to climb the mountain this season. Sunday's avalanche came at the start of Nepal's autumn climbing season, when the end of the monsoon rains makes weather in the high Himalayas unpredictable. Spring is a more popular mountaineering season, when hundreds of climbers crowd the peaks. Mount Manaslu, which is 8,156 meters (26,760 feet) high, has attracted more climbers recently because it is considered one of the easier peaks to climb among the world's tallest mountains. Avalanches are not very frequent there, but in 1972 one struck a team of climbers and killed six Koreans and 10 Nepali guides. nnnn